It should come as no surprise to find CEOs and trustees of many of the world's leading art galleries and museums on hand for tomorrow's public reopening of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

It should come as no surprise to find CEOs and trustees of many of the world's leading art galleries and museums on hand for tomorrow's public reopening of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

A new museum opening is the 21st century's version of a royal wedding.

Besides, these visitors have either gone through much of the same thing or are likely do so – depending on their individual economies worldwide – in the near future.

In today's international art market, major galleries indulge in matching aspirations while needing to find similar solutions for similar problems. Take the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Earlier this year, LACMA opened its own major addition, the stand-alone Broad Museum of Contemporary Art designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano.

Much like the late Ken Thomson, the AGO's chief benefactor, Eli Broad had sufficient clout and cash to pave LACMA's road to renewal, but even he caused some bumps along the way. LACMA used Broad's contentious "gift" – the multi-billionaire real-estate tycoon let it slip a month before his museum opening that he was only loaning his collection, not donating it – to refocus its role as a museum.

"We realized we had an opportunity before us to show everyone we're a different museum," said LACMA president Melody Kanschat. "People should be entering our collection from our perspective and that's from a West Coast perspective."

For the AGO, a parallel decision meant a Canadian perspective "and to show the greatest collection of Canadian art," says AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum.

In terms of city-making, the art gallery has replaced the skyscraper or the sports dome as the signature civic landmark capable of revitalizing entire urban areas. At the onset of the project eight years ago, the AGO saw itself as part of "building a new city, " says Teitelbaum, "a city of possibility."

But staying competitive internationally was high on the AGO agenda as well.

By hiring Frank Gehry as its marquee architect, the AGO proved it could hold its own internationally even if the global gallery boom might presently be going bust.

"A new Gehry building places the AGO's Canadian collection into an international context," says Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and formerly the head of the AGO.

But beyond the superstar architect, the AGO's future will depend entirely on how the 108-year-old museum follows its game plan after spending $254 million.

"We had other models to follow," says Teitelbaum. "But we had to have our own solutions. We looked at MoMA and the Walker (in Minneapolis) and we analyzed what they did. Neither were right for us. Shutting down completely as they did was not an option. We worried about being out of sight, out of mind."

But did a partial shutdown for about two years keep public interest alive? The coming weekend, when AGO entrance is free to the public, may yield part of the answer. "We wanted to maximize our presence on the site as long as we could," Teitelbaum maintains.

MoMA shut down its central 53rd St. site for more than two years. "We had to demolish so much of our building that it made no sense to stay open," says Lowry. "Then we had this light-bulb moment. Why not take advantage of the building we had in Queens?"

So "MoMA QNS," a former staple-making factory, housed parts of the permanent collection until MoMA's 2004 downtown opening following its $850 million (U.S.) renovation by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi.

The AGO considered a similar off-site satellite operation, "but the returns were not sufficient to warrant the time and the expense, mostly from a marketing point of view," says Teitelbaum.

Privately, some architects around town now argue that the AGO expansion should indeed have been elsewhere. "Gehry might have been able to build an entirely new building for the gallery's contemporary collection," says one.

The Walker Art Center – in many ways a better model for the AGO than MoMA in terms of size and community – closed its doors entirely for 14 months until 2005 for its expansion by the Basel, Switzerland-based architectural firm of Herzog & de Meuron.

"But we had a whole program called Walker Without Walls, of exhibitions and screens we took out into the community," says Walker administration officer Phillip Bahar. "We were absent from the community for the whole time, but we were very visible."

Unlike MoMA or the Walker, the AGO fought to have some gallery space open, however limited. "But at a certain point, we got checkmated in finding a way of moving people through the construction site," says Teitelbaum.

Yet the Walker outreach program proved instructive, as the AGO also took its message out into the GTA.

"We decided we would increase our visibility," says Teitelbaum. "We had a robust presence at the Canadian National Exhibition and at the Gay Pride parade."

There's one more bit of AGO-Walker synchronicity: both were reopened on a citywide wave of culture-based building and expansion. "It gives the city a new visibility and a new importance," Bahar says.

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